Thursday, December 15, 2005

Podcasting with The Distant Librarian (sorta)

This is a little experiment. I just found a service called Talkr that will take any RSS feed and turn the text into an mp3 file, read by a nice robot female voice. It's surprisingly good! Not only can you give them an RSS feed to turn into mp3s, but I can, and have, given them my RSS feed so all my posts are automatically made available as a podcast via this feed -- just plug that in to your podcast aggregator and hear my posts read by me (if I was a female-sounding robot). You'll also find the feed over on the right under my Subscribe section. This service is free.

One drawback is that when I write something like "this feed", you will hear the words "this feed" read, but not the actual link. So because I (and most bloggers) tend to be telling you about other stuff on the web, you won't get the actual links read to you, unless of course I provide the entire URL spelled out in the post. We'll see.

Obvious connection to distance education (or ANY educational setting) - I absolutely guarantee that you have more visually-impaired students than you're aware of. What a great way to make your content more accessible!!!

Give it a listen at least. You don't have to use my blog as your experiment; find another one and imagine you couldn't read it. Listen to the mp3s created by Talkr - isn't that about 100% better than not having access to that content at all?

Disclaimer: Talkr does offer a revenue stream option, but I have chosen not to participate in it at this time, so I'm not getting anything if you decide you want to upgrade from their free to their paid-version.

We'll see how this goes - I may or may not leave it turned on, though I probably will, as it's just one more way to reach out w/o any additional work by me :-)